Hale County This Morning, This Evening (2018, RaMell Ross)
Wednesday 2nd of July, 6:45pm in the Richard Hoggart Building Cinema
Join us on Wednesday 2nd of July from 6:45pm (film starts at 7pm) in the Richard Hoggart Building Cinema for a screening of RaMell Ross’s Hale County This Morning, This Evening (2018). The film is 1 hour 16 minutes so the screening will finish around 8:15pm.
Unfortunately buried by the annual winter deluge of awards-bait movies, RaMell Ross’s Nickel Boys (2024) – an adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s novel – was arguably the best and most important American film of the last ten years. Before Nickel Boys, Ross made the 2018 documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening, a portrait of what he has called the ‘epic banal’ in the everyday lives of Black Americans living in Hale County, Alabama. The film’s 76 minutes were assembled from 1,300 hours of footage captured over a five-year period. Originally trained as a photographer, Ross brings not only an extraordinary sense for visual composition, but an intense theoretical rigour and reflexivity to his artistic practice. (For an example, listen to this podcast of Ross reading his key 2019 essay “Renew the Encounter” here.)
From a review in Sight and Sound by Luke Moody:
The stream of arranged images is held together by a singular sensibility over time, without interruption from filmic conventions such as characterisation, analytical scene logic or continuity of chronology. Though we witness major life moments of birth and death, Ross shows no desire to focus on a single storyline or arc, to move the film forward. The impression of each protagonist is sculpted through the cubism of Ross’s recording presence over time. His images take us into the fabric of daily rituals, ranging from domestic and personal moments to institutional spaces of church, college, ball games and exterior occurrences of encountered beauty: thick black tyre smoke diffusing sharp sunlight, a dazed deer struggling in the street, sunsets, storms. They’re sometimes banal, often sublime; day cuts to night, morning to evening and back again.
Throughout, Ross’s background as as photographer is evident. The value of a static frame is recognised, with a heightened focus on the way each image can convey a paradigm of meaning. This manifests in an undulance of discovering glances, intentioned, distracted, interacting and often dreaming, emanating an overwhelming feeling of being present. In breaking away from traditional linear form and allowing reflection, Ross has created a filmic experience just as fluid as lived life can be. His composition of sight traces formal attributes of earlier photographic works, using the frame to crop bodies in a landscape, spatially isolating small gestures or movements.
Often shooting from a seated or eye-level position, Ross physically removes the possibility of hierarchical relations, or looking down on his protagonists. There’s a certain introverted composure to his lens, often observing the world from a static position, allowing phenomena to be, and to be analysed, without interrogation: looking, staring, reflecting, not approaching. Each of these glimpses evoke hours; time resides between them. Although imbued with this sense of a singular point of view, scenes are never staged; they are always planted in Ross’s perspective on occurring phenomena.
In recent nonfiction cinema the notion of an embodied lens has commonly been depicted as a sensory lens, a purely physical presence, but here the camera also communicates a psychic or perceptual navigation of the director’s milieu. A shot that might serve as a cutaway in more linear nonfiction narratives features as an extended moment, a pensive scene. Sometimes you can see the world differently just by sitting still and taking the time to look at it.